It’s the year 2017 — social media sites are competing for attention, and even the powerful and highly-regarded use blogging sites like Medium. With that in mind, does the average user need a personal website?

It’s so easy to lose track of the meaning of words. Say any word enough times and it becomes a mere sound, its semantic content steadily evaporating with each additional usage (“anthill…anthill…anthill…”) Some words, such as “democracy,” “justice,” and “fascism,” can eventually turn into little more than empty praise or pejorative, essentially the equivalent of declaring “Hooray for this thing!” or “Boo to that thing.”

But, and this should go without saying, if people are actually trying to communicate with one another their words need to have meaning, and we need to have relatively fixed and identifiable definitions for concepts and actions.

In powering his home, Gore still greatly outpaces most Americans in energy consumption. The findings were shocking:

• The past year, Gore's home energy use averaged 19,241 kilowatt hours (kWh) every month, compared to the U.S. household average of 901 kWh per month.3,4

• Gore guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years.5

• In September of 2016, Gore's home consumed 30,993 kWh in just one month – as much energy as a typical American family burns in 34 months.

• During the last 12 months, Gore devoured 66,159 kWh of electricity just heating his pool. That is enough energy to power six average U.S. households for a year.

No matter how the numbers are viewed, Al Gore uses vastly more electricity at his home than the average American – a particularly inconvenient truth given his hypocritical calls for all Americans to reduce their home energy use.

"...When the situation in Venezuela got even worse, the Western Left fell silent on Venezuela. It is as if the country had just dropped off the map. It is clear what the next step will be: we will soon hear post-hoc rationalisations explaining why Venezuela was never “really” socialist, and why it is a silly straw man to hold the failure of that experiment against the socialist Left. This process has already begun.

Noam Chomskynow says he never described “Chavez’s state capitalist government as ‘socialist’ … It was quite remote from socialism. Private capitalism remained … Capitalists were free to undermine the economy in all sorts of ways, like massive export of capital.”

This has happened many times before. In the 1930s, hundreds of Western intellectuals flocked to Stalin’s Soviet Union, and came back praising it to the skies. A few years later, they decided that Soviet socialism was not “real” socialism, and crucially, that it had never been socialist in the first place. Then the same thing happened all over again in Cuba, in Mao’s China, in Enver Hoxha’s Albania, and many other places...

There are varieties of fatuity – and then we come to Archbishop Justin Welby...

Crying for nanny is of course a characteristic of the infantile mind. Like weak men everywhere, Welby has a craving for authority, for someone to tell him what to think and what to do. Plato would have provided him with such figures. Plato called them Guardians, which the Latin philosophers translated as Custodes. And they immediately asked the question, Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes: Who Will Guard the Guardians?

Round of applause, please everyone. Let’s hear it for the Archbishop of Cant.

Justin Brown at Primal Video loves WeVideo

Until quite recently, Online Video Editors had a long way to go to compete with even the most basic desktop video editing software. But with faster internet speeds (and enough development cycles) they’re starting to catch up!

These days there are some solid options for editing video online, and the benefits of these cloud video editing options can be huge – for the right people…

WeVideo is one of the leading online video editing software options, and after putting it through its paces, Justin covers his thoughts and experiences in this WeVideo Review.